Search Observer-Reporter

Search Archive

10/6/2008 3:33 AM

Email this article • Print this article  

This article has been read 1717 times.

By Terri T. Johnson, Staff writer

ttjohnso@observer-reporter.com

There's a small parcel of land nestled between two buildings smack in the middle of downtown Washington that remains, more than six decades later, as testimony to one woman's stance against alcohol in the workplace.

Rate This Story:
1 the lowest - 5 the highest

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

Current rating:

The plot - 29 feet wide by 40 feet deep - between the Observer Publishing Co. building and its circulation department on South Main Street made the transition from beer garden to outdoor garden in the 1940s. It happened when then-owner Margaretta Donnan Stewart discovered some of her employees were enjoying a shot and a beer while she paid them to publish the daily newspaper.

According to her great-grandson, current publisher Tom Northrop, when his great-grandmother took over operations after her husband, John L. Stewart, died in 1940, she learned some of the night shift employees, mainly in the composing room, would walk out of the building, down the stairs and enter the bar for a quick shot and a beer.

Northrop said his great-grandmother, a teetotaler, was not pleased. So she went into the tavern, the name of which is lost in history, and asked the owner if he was interested in selling.

The story goes, according to Northrop, that when told the bar was not for sale, Stewart asked what the price would be if it were.

Upon being quoted a figure, she pulled out her checkbook and wrote a check, perhaps while wearing one of her ubitiquous purple outfits and mostly likely wearing a hat and white gloves, and bought the tavern.

She promptly had the building torn down and a garden planted. One can only guess at the reaction of the employees who then had to forgo their nightly boilermakers.

More than 60 years later, the small area contains a massive pin oak tree and a small, but hardy, ginkgo tree. A sundial sits on a stone pillar near the front. Dark green holly bushes dotted with bright red berries hug the weathered, wrought-iron spiked fence that surrounds the plot.

Business office employee Debbie Young has taken the garden on as her personal project, Northrop said. She plants and weeds the shaded area without want of recognition. In the spring, iris and daffodil blooms emerge before Young plants a variety of shade-hardy annuals. In the late summer and fall, squirrels gather and store acorns around the oak.

Over the years, other employees, like Elsie Ruffing and Bridget Vilencia, have tended the delicate garden.

Northrop said there are no plans to develop the small plot, but rather to keep it as a place of refuge in the middle of the city, as testimony to great-grandmother Stewart's temperance.

Home

1 comments

Margaretta Donnan Stewart : 10/6/2008
Alexander Donnan, my grandfather, was her brother. His wife's father, Ernest F. Acheson, was, according to my cousin, the first Representative to put a prohibition bill before Congress.

Marion Donnan Mahoney

---

All comments will be reviewed by administrators and posted to their respective articles within 24 hours. Comments deemed inappropriate will not be posted.

Subject:
Body:
Poster:

Enter text seen above: